“Did you do this to my child?” She locked eyes with the man. “Who did this?”ĭelia marched to the mill, squeezing her son’s wrist as she tugged him along. “Who did this to you, Michael?” she asked, voice low and tight. Delia scanned her son’s blood-crusted face and torn shirt. Michael got up, ran home, and spotted his mother in the yard, washing clothes in an iron tub set over a fire. (Photograph by Dan Weiner / © John Broderick) He tried to rise, but a fist smashed his face. As Michael bent to pick up the bucket, the white man’s boot connected with the boy’s ear. The mill owner grabbed Michael by his shirt and kicked over his bucket of milk.

It was the white mill owner: “Say, boy, run get a bucket of water for my men from down at the stream.”Īpologizing, Michael told the mill owner he was on an errand. As he carried his bucket, he paused in front of a sawmill where he watched burly men and oxen at work, hauling timber. Michael was about twelve years old when his mother sent him on his mission that bright summer day around 1910. “I remember, as a small boy, my mother was a woman who shared what she had with others,” he said in a newly discovered set of audiotaped interviews he made for an unpublished autobiography. “She was a very devout Christian,” recalled Michael, who would go on to change his name to Martin Luther King Sr. Yet when Delia heard that her neighbor had a sick cow that wouldn’t give milk, she acted without hesitation. The white man kept most of the money from the crops, but it was the King family, one generation removed from slavery, that cleared the soil stone by stone, planted and picked the cotton, and went hungry when the scorching sun rendered the earth no more fertile than a rutted road. The shack and the land around it belonged to a white man. TAKE THIS BUCKET of milk to the neighbors, Delia King told her son Michael one day.ĭelia and her husband, Jim King, lived with their growing brood of children in a tiny wooden sharecroppers’ shack in Stockbridge, Georgia, about twenty miles southeast of Atlanta. Here & Now's Scott Tong talks with Jonathan Eig, author of ' King: A Life.' magazine / Library of Congress) Book excerpt: 'King'

knew as a college student that he was going to 'kill Jim Crow.' We learn about King in a new biography that includes some new revelations about the man. Gordon “Gunny” Gundrum (park ranger) eyes the crowd, and Mahalia Jackson (hat andĭr. As King delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech, Bayard Rustin (in glasses) stands behind,

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